The Weight of Angels Page 15

  ‘I’m not going back,’ he said, ‘if that’s what’s bothering you.’

  ‘But when you were there. Did you ever see anyone hanging around? I mean, did you ever see the same person twice?’

  ‘Mum, just leave it!’ he said, nearly shouting. ‘I’m not going back. I don’t want a phone. I’m not asking you for anything. Just leave me alone.’

  ‘Oh, okay, I’ll leave you alone,’ I said. ‘Except for this one thing: I’m never going to leave you alone, Angel. You’re my son. I’m your mother. You are stuck with me asking you stuff and worrying about you and being right in your face whether you want me there or not until the day I pop my clogs. Me and your dad. Sorry, kid. That’s a family.’

  ‘Aye, right,’ he said. ‘Our perfect family.’

  I let go of his ankle and laid a hand instead on his arm. He swatted me away. ‘Is this about Gran and Granddad?’ I was casting around wildly now, but I hadn’t forgotten him saying that Billie had been in their swimming pool. ‘Just because they reckoned they’d done their job and I’d graduated, you have to believe I’d never do that to you.’

  He was moving. He sat up and shook back damp hair. ‘You haven’t got a bloody clue, Mum, have you? And you think I’m as clueless as you are.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I stared at him, his red eyes and his picked spots.

  ‘If you have to ask the question . . .’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t understand the answer. That’s the second time I’ve heard that today. Okay, answer this question instead. Why weren’t you surprised when the cops found the bones?’

  ‘Bones?’ he said. He shook his head and did that breathing-out laugh. ‘Not a clue.’

  So I left him, shut the door on the stale air and misery, went into the kitchen and pulled the magnetic notepad down off the fridge door.

  So many notes, over the years. The early ones had love hearts and kisses on them, then they were dashed off in shorthand code as we juggled our jobs and the baby: ETA? Defrost 8 mins. Lately I’d been careful to compose them just right: kisses again and nothing too breezy. Still, I had never hesitated this long. I could text Marco, but he’d call back. He always did. And for some reason I couldn’t fathom, I didn’t want to talk to him. ‘Gone to big T,’ I wrote in the end. ‘Need to PaT. KO. Love you, Ax’.

  That should do it. It would make him happy to see me back to my old ways, off to the big Tesco to push a trolley, always my cure for a rough day. And he’d know what I meant by KO, not OK. He was always better at talking to Angel than I was. Loved his daddy’s boy.

  It shone out across the dark like a mega-church and I could feel myself unwinding as soon as I bumped the trolley over the corded mat between the double doors and into the Technicolor burst of flowers and magazines and the pumped-out scent of cinnamon rolls. I took my coat off and stowed it in the baby seat, checked there were plenty of hot chicken portions in the display for when I’d finished and headed for the books.

  I didn’t even need to buy anything, just touch and wonder. Seven quid for two good paperbacks, like the bras and pants for a tenner a set. A client bored me to death once about why I should shop local and sign some online petition, but nowhere else made me quite as happy in quite the same way. And it was guaranteed to keep Marco and Angelo away, too, so it was all mine for the taking.

  I put pâté, raisin loaf and coconut milk in my trolley, feeling a little bit of the last six months shake loose and lift away from me in flakes, like the dark grease from a roasting pan when it’s plunged into deep hot water. I could even face the cosmetics aisle again. At first, after I’d lost my wholesale supplier, I couldn’t stand trawling up and down buying this mass-produced muck, then I couldn’t afford it and I was buying litre bottles of body lotion, putting it on my face and pressing a flannel over it before bed. When I got up to the toilet one time, Marco, sitting in the living room with a bottle of beer half drunk, said, ‘Why’s your face so shiny? You not feeling well?’ I said nothing. It was shiny every night, as he’d know if he ever came to bed, because I was saving the money he spent on beer.

  There was another woman in the make-up aisle with me. I walked past her, then something about her face made me turn back. She was testing lipsticks on the back of her hand, opening tubes and drawing stripes on herself. She had a phone crooked against her shoulder.

  ‘Calm down,’ she was saying. A haughty voice, plenty tobacco in it. ‘I shall hang up if you don’t calm down and talk properly.’ She found a shade she liked and smeared it over her mouth, then looked around for a mirror. I was sure I knew her, I thought, as she wheeled briefly to face me. I pretended to read the back of the night-cream box I was holding and kept listening.

  ‘How short is short?’ she said. ‘You haven’t shaved it off, have you?’

  Her face was definitely familiar, strong and ugly, and the way she stood, knees locked in that over-straight way and her high bosom thrown out.

  ‘Julius Caesar?’ she said, with a smoky laugh. ‘That’s supposed to be a reasonable stylistic choice, is it?’

  I turned away and picked up another pot of cream from a higher shelf, jumping when the censor went off. This was one of the expensive ones.

  ‘What?’ said the woman. ‘I didn’t hear you. I’m in the middle of a supermarket with God knows what going on.’ I could feel her eyes on my back. ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’ll grow Ju-ju. God knows, it can’t look worse. No, of course I won’t sue them. You must learn to act with a little more— . . . I shan’t stay on the line if you’re going to be silly. I’m hanging up. Goodbye.’

  I gave her a minute, then turned round. She was still twisting this way and that, looking for the mirror she wanted. I scrabbled in my bag and held out a vanity compact to her. A pretty embellished thing Angelo had got me for Christmas. I knew he had probably pocketed it in some accessories shop but I treasured it anyway.

  ‘Ha,’ said the woman. ‘Very civil of you. These places used to have mirrors and tissues, didn’t they? Gad! Horrific. I look like a tart.’

  I was sure now. This was Julia’s mother.

  ‘Did one of your girlfriends get the haircut from hell?’ I said. ‘Sorry. I couldn’t help overhearing.’

  ‘My daughter,’ she said. ‘She’s boarding and there seems to have been a sort of pyjama party that got out of hand. She’s done a bit of a DIY Samson job, apparently.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a single way to keep this conversation going.

  ‘No loss. She had perpetrated a hideous home dye job anyway and she takes after her late lamented father in the follicular department.’

  I hoped I’d managed to hide the leap of interest in my face. ‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ She was raking through the lipsticks again.

  ‘Late father, you said.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Not a bit of it. He left no will so I scooped the lot. No loss at all.’

  ‘And your daughter’s away at boarding school, is she?’ I said. ‘That must be difficult at such a time.’

  ‘What?’ she said again. She was just about to tell me to get lost and stop pestering her. I knew it.

  ‘You’re working from the wrong palette, you know,’ I said, moving closer. ‘You should be steering clear of bluish reds and pinks, with your colouring. A tomato-red would be much more flattering.’

  ‘Tomato?’ she said, with another rasping laugh. ‘Bet they don’t call it that!’

  I handed her a tissue and started riffling through the stand, ignoring the ones she’d broken open, looking for what I wanted. ‘Here you go,’ I said, seizing one and handing it over. ‘Try this.’

  ‘November Sunset,’ she said. ‘See what I mean? Not a tomato in sight.’ But she cracked the seal and smeared it on her lips, rubbing them together to spread it. She peered in my mirror and grunted. ‘You’ve done me a favour,’ she said. ‘I look almost human.’

  ‘You look very striking,’ I said. The yellow-re
d was better against her drinker’s complexion and her tombstone teeth. She really was a remarkably unattractive woman. So much so that she had come out the other end somehow and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ she said. She gave me a little nod of dismissal and started to move away.

  ‘You could say it with coffee,’ I said. ‘I’m going up to the caff for a sit-down.’

  She frowned. Maybe she thought I was trying to pick her up. I smiled and walked away, then held my grin in check as I heard her coming after me.

  ‘I’m headed that way myself,’ she said. ‘Meeting someone, but I’m early. So why not? Why ever not?’ She had pocketed the lipstick, I saw. I left my trolley at the bottom of the stairs for when I came back.

  ‘What did you say your daughter’s name was?’ I said, when we sat down with our coffees. ‘Sorry. I wasn’t really eavesdropping, but being a hairdresser, I couldn’t help pricking up my ears.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘And I suppose you do all the paint and powder too, do you?’

  ‘Busted,’ I said. ‘Jo-jo? That’s my sister’s name.’ The lies were pouring out of me.

  ‘Juju,’ she said. ‘Short for Julia.’

  ‘How old is she?’ I said. ‘You never think when they’re toddling that they’ll ever be more trouble, do you?’

  ‘Julia gives trouble a new meaning,’ the woman said. ‘Hence a meeting, out of hours, with her bloody headmistress. If I go in during office hours I’m liable to break things. We meet on neutral territory.’

  I nodded. She was really going for this ‘boarding school’ story. Odd. Women like her were usually immune from shame. They let it all hang out and stared down anyone who had an opinion. ‘Private school?’ I said. ‘No way you’d get this service otherwise.’

  ‘I pay for it and more, believe me. And she’s late.’ She took a draught of her coffee as if it was a pint of cider on a hot summer’s day and left half the colour from her bottom lip on the cup. ‘Ugh,’ she said, swiping at it with her thumb. ‘That’s why I don’t usually paint myself like the whore of Babylon. But this bloody woman I’m meeting is always so perfect. With her scarves matching her shoes and her bloody tailored—’

  I was gone. I shouted over my shoulder about my pager going off on vibrate, as if a hairdresser would ever have to break into a run, and then I was gone. I left the trolley where it stood and took a wide swerve towards the front door, checking for Dr Ferris before I darted out of the double doors and across the car park, my stomach roiling. Not until I was sitting in my car did I let my breath out.

  No way. It was strange for a school headmistress to meet one of the mums at half seven in Tesco’s café. It was bizarre for Dr Ferris to do the same. Which one of them didn’t want Julia’s mum at the hall? And why?

  I couldn’t make sense of it, but one thing was clear. That woman had said her husband was dead. Dr F had told me he’d walked out. Someone was lying.

  Chapter 13

  The weekend laboured past, an angry wind hurling rain at the windows and the three of us sealed in our separate little spheres.

  Angelo stayed in his room, silent and plugged in, refusing to answer any of my enquiries or even respond to my smiles. His MP3 and earbuds were so tiny it seemed worse, somehow, than a big box on his desk and a cushiony pair of headphones that dwarfed his face, like a bonnet. Now he was just absent, and until you looked closely, it was hard to see why. ‘You know where I am, if you need me,’ I mouthed at him.

  Marco was on the couch, his phone on the armrest chirping at him. He had a ring binder of his own, a grubby blue plastic thing mended with insulating tape, and he flipped through it, pretending to be learning the stock, but with golf and football both on the split screen.

  I should have tried harder to get through to them, either of them, but I stayed upstairs, under the covers, drawing up treatment plans, trying to learn names. There were three junkies called Ron, Trish and Cate: three women in their twenties, with the same over-dyed, over-straightened hair and the same dark shadows round their eyes, and with histories so identical I knew I’d never learn which was which. I wondered if it mattered. Unless I got the name of one of their kids wrong, they’d never know. The new ana-mia joining Drew, Posy and Roisin was called Beryl. Her photo didn’t tell me if she dated from when ‘Beryl’ was a common name and she’d been ill for years or if ‘Beryl’ was coming round again and she just looked old from starving. I studied her picture and wondered if I would dare to touch her, if her scabbed skin and skeletal frame could actually stand up to anything I could offer.

  That was my split screen of golf and footy. What I was really drinking from, as Marco drank from the beeps of his phone, was the picture Sylvie had drawn for me. I gazed at it for long spells and spun them into tales. It hadn’t even occurred to Dr Ferris that Sylvie had put those marks on the paper, I thought again. And she’d been thunderstruck that Sylvie met my gaze that first day. She hadn’t seen the smile or heard the echoed whisper, ‘Better.’ Maybe I was getting through to Sylvie like no one had in all those long years.

  Once, just once, I tried to get the three of us back together again.

  ‘Do me a favour?’ I asked them, when they were standing in the kitchen waiting for the Chinese carry-out to reheat in the microwave. Marco, clearly, wasn’t in a cooking mood. I held out a sheet of paper and a black marker to each of them. ‘Take this and draw me a house, a tree and a person.’

  ‘Mu-um,’ said Angelo.

  ‘What?’ Marco said.

  ‘It’s for work. I want some examples to show the patients who might have trouble with it. Come on, ten minutes, eh? I’ll dish the food up when it’s ready.’

  ‘Don’t give me any mushrooms,’ said Angelo, as he threw himself down at one end of the couch.

  Marco took the other end and uncapped the pen, then stared back at me through the open kitchen door. ‘Examples,’ he said. ‘Not a test?’

  ‘A test of what?’ I asked him.

  I couldn’t resist watching over their shoulders as they worked. Marco drew our house, our old house, as detailed as the elevation we’d pored over when it was being built, double garage and all. He drew a Christmas tree covered with decorations, baubles filled in with black except for a bit left white to look like a highlight, and endless interlocking circles for the paper chains we used to make when Angel was tiny. The person he drew was me: hair scraped up in a ponytail like for work and dressed in my short-sleeved tunic and my flat, comfy shoes. I ruffled his hair, then turned to check on Angelo.

  He had drawn a child’s house, four windows and a smoking chimney, an apple tree in the garden, heavy with fruit, and under it, a baby. Swaddled like a little lozenge with its eyes shut and its lashes sweeping its cheeks, it was cuddled into the roots of the tree.

  ‘Cheat!’ said Marco. ‘Draw another one with hands and feet, you lazy get!’

  ‘That’s fine, Angel,’ I said. ‘Don’t listen to him.’ I twitched both sheets away and rolled them up.

  ‘If you did that in the likes of Afghanistan,’ Angel said, ‘would you just get those big blue blobs? What are they called?’

  ‘Burkhas?’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do it,’ Marco said. ‘You’re not allowed pictures of people. It’s against their religion.’

  ‘Why?’ Angel said. ‘What harm does it do?’

  ‘Same as eating steak on a Friday,’ said Marco. ‘Zero.’

  Then the microwave pinged and, as if it signalled the end of a game, the moment of closeness was over. Angelo took his plate to his room. Marco turned up the volume on three angry pundits arguing strategy and I ate standing in the kitchen, both drawings spread before me, wondering. Maybe it wasn’t a swaddled baby at all. Maybe it was supposed to be a mummy in bandages. Maybe he was thinking of the long-dead monks over the road, buried among the tree roots, wrapped in their winding sheets. But I had told them it wasn’t a test so I could hardly start poking around asking questions.
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br />   We made it to the shore of Monday morning somehow. At seven o’clock, Marco and I were doing our usual dance, reaching past each other on the landing to get our clothes out, skirting round each other to get dressed in the one spot in the bedroom you could stand upright at the bottom of the bed, then bumping into each other in the kitchen where you couldn’t open the fridge all the way if someone was bending over the grill to see how the toast was doing. It had never occurred to me when we lived in our own house that some of the ease and affection was because we could all get away from each other. I didn’t want to face what that might mean.

  When the bell rang, I wondered if Lars had come miles early and felt myself flush. I hadn’t mentioned him yet. I told myself Marco – burly, handsome Marco with his great smile and his great hair – wouldn’t think Lars was worth mentioning. So why was I red, I asked myself. I went to the door to distract myself from the answer.

  It was the police. The same sergeant with a different WPC, just as eager as the last one to show her boss she wasn’t soft. She looked at me as if I’d come in on her shoe.

  ‘It’s just too much of a coincidence, you see, Mrs McGovern,’ the sergeant said, once he was inside, settling himself. ‘Your lad. He hangs out at the abbey every night after school, fair weather or foul. But he doesn’t tell you anything about the body. But the report comes from his phone. But he says it’s been stolen. But he hasn’t told you that either. You see the problem, don’t you?’

  ‘I see a lot of “but” on show,’ I said. What was wrong with me? It was stupid to piss off an overweight cop. And it was probably Marco I was angry with, really, because for some insane reason he had gone and blabbed to the cops that the stolen phone was news to us. Maybe he had even confirmed the neighbour’s muckraking about where Angelo hung out too.

  Then the rest of the sergeant’s words sank in and I came back from inside the cloud of rage and dread and really looked at him. ‘Doesn’t tell us anything about the body?’ I echoed. ‘Likes of what? Is that right enough what they’re saying about the flood washing it up then? Was it visible?’